Cyber Security

The past two decades have seen rapid advancements in technology resulting in our entire modern way of life depending on the Internet and the availability of smaller, more powerful, less expensive internet devices.

This rapid growth, widespread use and amazingly beneficial impact of the Internet for data processing, commerce and communication comes with attendant issues and risks, such as cybercrime. No single entity – whether they be nations, corporations or individuals – is immune. Companies must manage rapidly increasing opportunity and complexity through global teams and customer relationships across many geographies and jurisdictions with diverse regulations (e.g. privacy laws). Finally, there is a talent gap between the experiences of many internal teams and the global nature of the risks and threats they are trying to manage/mitigate. All of this magnifies the need to better leverage both financial and human capital.

The CEO and Executive team now need to build a robust Cyber Security and IT Risk organization under a single executive-level leader. Since the information technology options are evolving rapidly (e.g. Facebook did not exist 10 years ago) and qualified talent can come from previously untapped sources (e.g. cloud hosting companies) – identifying, matching, hiring and retaining executive talent is a critical competency.

Talent Imperatives

Leadership attributes for success include massive cross-industry collaboration and corporation-government partnership, combined with active engagement with leaders of business functions across the enterprise. Our clients increasingly realize that expertise in emerging and converging technologies combined with critical thinking and big data skills needs to be reflected in the experiences and approaches of leaders, if they are to be successful.

Unique Capabilities

Egon Zehnder is uniquely positioned to serve corporations in this important and dynamic space through our extensive expertise in helping companies with leadership challenges. Critical ingredients to our success are our unique global approach to searches (accessing a broader pool), fixed fee construct (inoculation to wide ranging compensation bands) and thriving Board, CIO, Technology & Risk practices that enable us to take a holistic approach. We have seen much recent client activity in this space and have completed numerous successful Chief Information Security Officer hiring assignments for major international banking and insurance institutions, technology and services companies.